E360: The Hardest Lessons I Learned from Building 4 Unicorns

23:30You know, like this job's gonna be terrible. Like, by the way, like we're gonna ask more of you than anyone else has ever asked of you and try to hold you accountable. But hey, dirty secret, you're gonna have to hold yourself accountable because we're all too busy, you know, working on all of our things and trying to stitch it together. The, I do believe in the great man theory or the great woman theory of history because people need to wake up in the morning and they need to believe that what they do matters. And if you don't believe that, I don't think you push the future into the place where you want to live or anyone else does.

23:57Now, how much of it is a single individual? You know, there's a lot of things in the world where you take out a single person and I don't know that that ever happens. One of the things we do talk about is sort of the history of companies. This is, you and I have talked about this before, I'm sure. This idea that in the history of all mankind, humankind, every company has failed for the same reason. And it has failed because it ran out of money, right? That's why the failure mode is always the same, but the success mode is highly idiosyncratic. It is of a moment in time with just the right people, with just the right macro environment, cost of capital, what the competition is doing, you know, is there a war going on overseas right now and how it affects your gas prices and everything else.

24:38These are all the idiosyncratic things that sort of add up to the moment in time of a company that can be successful today. That requires the person and the people also being there and showing up to the office today to do the work that needs to be done today. And if you don't take advantage of that opportunity or you don't build that thing, the moment will pass by. And that isn't necessarily that the moment will pass by and someone else will build the thing that you are building. I mean, do we think someone else would have built SpaceX in our lifetime if not for Elon? I don't think so. I don't think so.

25:07Very low chance. I think so. And by the way, like get someone on the podcast or get someone to try to make that case. And I want that, I want to build, I want to build a company with that person. The person who thinks they can do that and like truly believes it in their bones. Great, let's go do it. Let's, let's, let you go do something and I'm here to support you. I would love to get behind that. Let's go do something great. Holding greatness in your mind of like what, like something that's like scary in the future that you want to see the future look like and then having the will to go out and try to motivate not only yourself, but others to build it is hard.

25:42It's just really hard. And, you know, where we sit in this crossroads of biology, there's a lot of things that are super exciting in the biotech industry right now. But I don't believe if left to our own devices, all of those things will emerge. I think it does require great scientists, entrepreneurs who wake up every day a little bit psychotic about doing the thing that needs to be done today. And if anything, it's even harder in this industry because we all have pretty good knowledge about where the competition lies. Like if you're working on a particular drug target, maybe you publish it in your academic lab, and then maybe we saw 30 or$40 million of venture capital go behind that and we're aware of the target and what you're doing.

26:15And then all we know is that you went out of business. It's reasonable that like maybe you collected some data that said that that was a bad drug target or that there was something about your medical hypothesis, your scientific hypothesis didn't work out. We don't have perfect information. We just view it from the outside. That might set that biology back by five or 10 or 20 years, right? There's so many incredibly complicated problems that are at our fingertips today as an industry that you're constantly deciding which bet to place. If I only had$10 million, what's the drug target? Like what is the scientific problem that I want to go solve?

26:48And so I worry a lot about when we work on a drug program that if we screw it up, there might not be a second shot at it. And so we need to take me as the partner for our folks, the customers we work with. I want us to take really great care because there might not be a second or a third opportunity to go hit that in the next five, 10 years. Eventually we'll probably figure it out, But eventually it might happen a long time ago. It muddies the water for the entire, can muddy the water. I mean, look what happened with gene therapy or cell therapy or just kind of gene therapy in particular in these early days.

27:17Like we had some problems with the technology and how we handled it and as an industry. And it did set us back a bit by maybe as much as a decade or so in where we're at. Before we get back to the show, quick invitation for the allocators in our audience. On Thursday, May 14th, I'm gathering an exclusive group of allocators in New York City for dinner to discuss the evolving landscape of private markets and the DPI crisis. How are savvy allocators navigating the liquidity crunch? If you're an institutional allocator, RIA, or family office, this dinner is for you. Space is limited, so please go to weisbirdcapital.com slash events right now to secure your seat at the table.

27:56That's W-E-I-S-B-U-R-D, as in David, capital.com slash events. Before we get back to the show, a quick invitation for the allocators in our audience. On Thursday, May 14th, I'm gathering an exclusive group of allocators in New York City for dinner to discuss the evolving landscape of private markets and the DPI crisis. How are savvy allocators navigating the liquidity crunch? If you're an institutional allocator, RIA, or family office, this dinner is for you. Space is limited, so please go to weisbirdcapital.com slash events right now to secure your seat at the table. that's w-e-i-s-b-u-r-d as in david capital.com slash events before we get back to the show quick invitation for the allocators in our audience on thursday may 14th i'm gathering an exclusive group of allocators in new york city for dinner to discuss the evolving landscape of private markets and the dpi crisis how are savvy allocators navigating the liquidity crunch if you're an institutional allocator ria or family office this dinner is for you space is limited so So please go to weisbirdcapital.com slash events right now to secure your seat at the table.

29:04That's W-E-I-S-B-U-R-D as in David, capital.com slash events. Today, said another way, the entrepreneur that, let's say an entrepreneur decided to go after that in two years, every investor is going to be asking him this question, asking him or her. Every potential high intelligent employee is going to ask him the same question. Yeah. So you have all these frictions above and beyond starting a company, which itself is hard. Sure. So it's like, what target are you going to go after? Unless you're very passionate about this one target, you're going to go after something that has less friction. Right.

29:34And boy, we live in a crazy industry with biotech or biopharma because the time horizons of answering that question are years, if not decades. The amount of capital required historically has been 10, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And so these are not small experiments and they're not ones that are you've got a great feedback loop. Like your OODA loop kind of stinks for drug development and drug discovery. There's no lean startup. There's no lean startup, although that is the alloy dream. That is our model, which is how do we help everyone operate a bit more lean and truly to be committed to that, to reduce the cost of every single step of the process.

30:05We started in drug discovery and we started in antibodies. We've expanded into other types of biologics and ever increasingly we're doing more in preclinical and clinical development. But it's all towards an eye of how do we reduce the cost, shorten the timelines and increase the probability success of every single inflection point with a goal towards making all of the revenue of answering a question. So the cost of answering a question smaller every time we do it and providing that service to the world. What you get in exchange for doing that is more innovation. I think that's what's not obvious to folks is if you have a million dollar experiment versus a 10 million dollar experiment as a field, we're just going to get more experiments.

30:44The less expensive they are. If you think of the bottleneck as the professionals doing the experiment. The professionals, but also the capital. I mean, biotech is only so much risk taking capital. Exactly. I mean, it's a specialist driven industry. Like it just friends don't let friends invest in biotech. We talk about friends and families. We've done investments together. And like every time you do like that early stage, like friends and family round, there's, there should be no such thing as a friends and family round. When we put money into our venture studio, we only invited colleagues and collaborators because it has to be people who are like, it's a way of diligencing your investors.

31:16Oh, it's more of like, so that they know what they're getting into. You know, if your mom asks you because she's nice and she likes what you do to like put money into your biotech fund, you're like, mom, I really appreciate the support. But I don't know if this is the place where you should. It's better just to grant her shares. And it's, I mean, this is, and I said that jokingly, sort of. There's only so much. Do you have money in the Venture Studio? No, I don't think I even let my mom. There's only so much pressure you could take as a human being. Losing mom's money is not ideal. We need to diversify as a family here.

31:43But no, it's because it's a deeply specialist driven. and you look at specialists just on the hedge fund side and the crossover side and the venture capital side, like this is an area where the reason why it's driven by specialists is in part because of the complexity of the science and also the time horizons and these compounding complexity. Whereas if we're building a software company, at least we have the advantage of it being something that we might use ourselves. Like you can experience a software product and get a bit of an intuitive sense of whether it's useful. if we've got a new crm that competes with hubspot like i use hubspot like i can sort of experiencing that as an investor someone can come to me and be like hey this is going to be better well how would it be better it's going to have all the features then it's going to be one tenth the cost okay great like if that was the pitch in biotech like that would be pretty easy like i've got your drug that today is a hundred thousand dollars and it's going to work and it'll only cost ten thousand now the problem is that pitch if you give it to me today as a biotech investor well well, that drug won't be approved for at least a decade because of the process of how we run clinical trials today.

32:42And you kind of don't know what competition will look like in a decade. Like a lot of things can change in 10 years. Maybe that first drug has gone generic and then the generic competition cuts the price by 90 % also. There's just, there's a lot of things can happen. So is there a rational case for investing in biotech today? Absolutely. I think maybe it comes down to time horizons. So how do you get in early? How do you invest in, how do you get into deals that no one else can get into? One of our philosophies in our family office is you want to own someone that no one else has. So sometimes something that's patented, is that super obvious?

33:16Like a patent is something that you can own something that no one else has. You defend your IP. A brand, the New York Yankees, no one else gets to own the Yankees. It's like an NFT. It's like an NFT. Yeah, sure. It's this, that's the best argument that I've heard about sports teams because I went deep into this. I interviewed Cass from Christopher Zook. There's parts of me that are conservatives, investors. There's parts of me that are very gung-ho as an entrepreneur. But when I see an asset bid up like a sports team by 10x over the last couple decades, I'm like, is this not a greater fool's theory?

33:45And the best argument that I've heard about that is that there's 30 NFTs in a specific league and it's an index of billionaires and decabillionaires. If there's going to be more decabillionaires in the future, there's going to be more demand for these 30 NFTs and they're going to bid up the price. There's also obviously an economic argument and cash flow meteorites all those. but this NFT and scarcity is an interesting argument. We also have a sports team and a sports league. You want to talk about it? I'm happy to talk about it. I'm happy to track back and see the analogies in biotech perhaps.

34:12But if you look at the big four in the United States and like the most expensive teams on it, I'm not sure that's like an NPV positive. Like just there on the mark, like the value, almost the equity. Not from a DCF perspective. It has to be an equity value play, right? And so why does the equity value of an NFT rise? Like in that like sort of the rarity? It's like, I don't know. like all the Monet's that were already painted, they're worth more today than they were 50 years ago. Like, why is that? They're the same. Like the product is the same, the way that you experience. They're collecting. There's, there's a reason why it's worth more because it, because it's unique.

34:44I think the trade in sports today, I mean, obviously we think a lot about AI and ML. We think a lot about software. We think a lot about this in the, in the field of drug discovery and development and incredibly exciting things that are happening in our labs and around the world. But I think about it a lot for our sports team as well. And so you, you look at what is the value of live entertainment. And in a world where we are awash with even better AI generated entertainment, I predict that we will value something that's real and tangible more. That we as humans, the experience like that, that stirring that you have in your heart, when you read something that a human wrote, where you experience a play or you look at a painting that you know is made by someone who's real, is that there's a whole internal story in your own mind, in your own heart that connects you with that in a way that if you know that it's made by AI, it can still be as equally beautiful.

35:34It can like, you can experience it in a way that like, maybe it's wonderful, but the fact that there's no human there, you're just going to feel differently about it. In our experience, we experience life through a temporal lens. Like we, we consume our reality through time. Like this, this experience we're having today, there's no, like we're both spending hours of our day for this, preparing for it and otherwise. And we only have one life to live. And the true, the, the only true currency that we have that is scarce is our time. venture capital and biotech where is it at today where are the opportunities and where can vcs still make money in biotech great question the venture capital and biotech looks like venture capital in general which is the funds have gotten bigger and it's logical why that happens we talk about this a lot you know all of us do which is if you're successful and you've got a hundred million dollar fund well then you earn the right to have a 200 million dollar fund and if you're successful you're in the right to have a 500 million dollar fund there's just this inevitable growth that if you're good at what you do you have a bigger and bigger fund.

36:32In biotech, there's a few exceptions to that. Atlas is a fund that has always had discipline to say that there's like a right size of fund. I deeply respect them for that. Those partners, they believe this is right scale to the number of partners they have and the amount of money they can deploy. The benchmark of biotech, they do a great job. They, you know, funds wax and wane and it's a power law model or even like you look at an exit like Moderna, it's like, did we have to like a third power law there? Like two power laws. I mean, that was such like a black swan event. But these are power law exits in biotech.

37:07It takes a very strong person to say, this is the right size fund and I'm not going to have an AUM driven model, like benchmark. Yeah. Right. Sorry, you said benchmark and like they said benchmark and now I'm like, yes, just like benchmark. So let's unpack why benchmark looks the way it does. We can, you know this as well as anyone else and I don't want to speak for them. But one of the things that I observe is that they also have a lot of their own capital in it. So it's a little bit like your super successful hedge fund friend that at some point wakes up and is like, I'm going all personally.

37:38You're doing family office. Yeah, exactly. Like what's better than 20, 25 % carry is 100 % carry on your own money. Right. And so why would you ever do that? Well, that also bumps into the gravity of the quality of the opportunities that you can source and manage. At some point, there's just a limit to that. You look at like Rentech and the Medallion Funds. there's like, it can't be a$60 billion fund. There's a size of that. I don't know if anyone's ever run the math on that, which is, let's say you could be a$700 million fund with management fees and carry. And let's say you could get it 2X, let's say 2 to 2.5X.

38:08Is it smarter to do a$300 million fund and put in 50 million or 100 million of your own money? It's a math question, but I don't know if anyone's actually run that. They put it down. I'm not surprised. You can talk to some folks on our Venture Studio team. Otherwise, there's an optimal size fund if you believe in what you're doing. Like if you believe in yourself. If you believe you have alpha, then there's actually a financially greedy disposition to fund size. Yeah, I like the way you say that, like a financially greedy. So take that in biotech. Long-term greedy. Long-term greedy, exactly. But it's like where can your conviction and your knowledge, the limits of your knowledge and your conviction actually return alpha?

38:43So one of the challenges you have in biotech or biopharma is we spend so much money in clinical trials, in particular late-stage clinical trials. So no one has enough money on their own to build the right portfolio. but then you also can't watch and manage that portfolio effectively. Where are the exciting places in biotech? We vote with our feet on this a little bit. So it's just like what we do. We go early stage. Exactly. So it's also just really rewarding that you can, by being early stage, you're at the point of creation of the technology or creation of the drug itself. And it's very little capital.

39:17So your reward on your own activity, on your contribution is actually very high. It's disproportionately high. And the later stage you go, we really reward capital as opposed to rewarding innovation. It's sort of just because if you're spending$200 million on a clinical trial where it turns out, especially if it's a binary event and so it's risky, you better have a lot of capital. And so because it requires so much capital and it crowds out other returns. I mean, these are highly predictable events. If they were highly predictable, you could go out and raise that money or it'd be lower cost of capital and then more value would probably accrue to the operator.

39:52But the later stage you get, the more you get into the clinic phase two, phase three, a lot of the values accumulate into the capital instead of to the operator. So the earlier stage you go, it's more supporting great scientists, entrepreneurs. I know you're not concerned about it, but I'm sure your investors are. What does a DPI look like for an early stage biotech? I would separate is most biotech companies are drug companies. So even if you have a platform, you're really trying to use the platform to make a drug that works. so the the fund itself i mean if you're returning 3x the fund three to four x the fund you're doing great um you uh biotech is is uncorrected in terms of is that a 14 years until you get your money back like early stages um biotech funds still have to operate within kind of the 10-year fund horizon these yes some of them extend out and um whether it's continuation vehicles or um they're coming to biotech as well they are coming to biotech as well do you like them I yeah I think it makes sense and it's an interesting alignment it's well we see so many take the alternative where you go public and there's just a zombie company that is trading below cash and so the public markets because there's no readout there's no readout but also just I mean for anyone trading below cash there's like is there confidence from the public markets that you're creating value if if you're trading like well below cash there's an argument to be made that you should take that company this is not in all cases but like in some of those cases you can look at it and you just look, let's just shut down the company.

41:17Let's return cash to investors and unlock value here. That's why I like it for venture and for private equity. It may not be the perfect solution. There's a lot of different issues. LPs have to re-underwrite the asset, but it's better than the alternative, which is cutting off the legs from your assets, selling out of steep discount. I think it's way better than the alternative. Capital markets are more efficient. They're more driven by returns. And there's a straight off between drug discovery, return of capital, and something has shifted with recent legislation. How do you think about this framework between we want to cure as many people, but we also have to have the right financial returns in the industry?

41:54What's your best paradigm? You have to make money. Like it's just the, the capitalist system is one that helps to organize all of the world's resources down to a moment in time of like, what are we going to do today? And the decision that one of our employees makes today is, do I come to work today? Okay, great. There's like a lot of trade-offs that go into that. Maybe they want to stay at home and tend to their sick child, but they have obligations today and they want to continue to be employed tomorrow. Not that we would let somebody off like that, but that is the calculus that goes through everyone's head.

42:21It is going to cost trillions and trillions and trillions of dollars to cure everything. And that money has to come from somewhere. And if there was some magical way to motivate people and to align the economy without having a capitalist system, like a capitalist reward system. I think we should just do that. I'd be on board with that. The truth is that if you don't reward innovation and risk-taking, you don't get innovation and you don't get risk-taking. There is no evidence in the history of humankind that there is a system that gets new innovation and gets creativity without rewarding those things.

42:56There's like even painting a painting that is new and is different, you will get ridiculed for that. If it looks different, right? You will just like, whatever's coming from your heart and to turn it into a painting, you will suffer the criticisms of the critics and you will suffer the criticisms of maybe your wife who loves you or your children who are like, dad, I thought you were good at painting. And therefore, those are all costs associated with doing something new and different. Now, what are the rewards? The rewards might be that you feel your own personal sense of satisfaction. The rewards can also be from that creative endeavor that someone values it and pays a premium because it's different, right?

43:31It's unique. It's your style. So I multiply that by like every single observation of how creativity works, looking backwards as a student of history. If you don't reward creativity and you don't reward risk taking, you don't get more of it. And so the future that I worry about is a command and control economy that is too top down and not bottoms up, where we think we've got it all right. And we tell people what the rules are and who's going to get rewarded. And we set too many of the, let's say the constraints of the system up that limit people's ability to capture the value that they create. because I don't worry about that because I'm going to make less money.

44:07I could care less. I just need the resources to do what we do. What I worry about is how do every incremental person that's going to show up and give their best self today and be really creative because if we're going to cure everything, if we're going to live in this like amazing abundant future where energy is free and medicine is cheap and affordable and accessible to everyone and we all live forever, we need innovation, right? Like it's innovation that's going to get us out of this trap that we have. It's actually the exception proving the rule, which is in spite of all these financial incentives and all this fame and accolades you could get to doing the hard thing, still so few people do the hard thing.

44:42So if you even take that away, where are we going to be? And why do so few people do the hard things? I totally agree with you. It just so happens that if you went to a great school, like you went to Tuck, had a great job, you're like, you get paid a lot of money in like your job that your last jobs were probably easier than what you do today. You also constantly challenge yourself well it's not about the binary of like am I going to do something that makes money or not make money am I going to do something that's meaningful or not meaningful it's like am I going to do something that's a little bit easier and still get paid enough and I think a lot of people approach their lives and they're not bad people that's just this is how life plays out that they're it's just you kind of just want to be home to see your kid's soccer game tonight and you you want to be able to take a few vacations in a year and like you just want to chill or get some sleep tonight And then there's the psychos who just for whatever reason, they're miswired.

45:33And you wake up every day feeling this feeling that you better get something done. Paradoxical because it's this deep sense of agency, which becomes self-fulfilling. You believe that you're the person that must solve this problem. And then you end up being the person that solves the problem. Totally. And then you surround yourself with the folks that all do. And so the most magical thing is when you can find yourself in an environment with a team where you all believe that you're going to figure it out. And the more pressure you're under, you find yourself in situations in history where the constraints really push you to dig deep and to solve problems.

46:07And I think there are 350 million people in America, 8.3 billion people on the face of the planet. I think most folks have an opportunity for greatness and that they have an ability to perform well above what they're doing today. It's just, they don't have to. I've gotten flexor to brag about myself a little bit. I've gotten much better at developing people and kind of getting this greatness out of them. One thing that I've found is oftentimes they resist for a while till they get a big outcome and they're like, wow, I could do great things. What does that big outcome look like? Depending on the position.

46:40They work really hard. Even like our editor worked really hard on our second Hermosi episode. Yeah. And she hated me for that two weeks. So just pressing, pressing, pressing. You could do better. You could do better. and now she's like the number one fan she and she like it's memed this experience to other employees at agency I mean look this is what we want for all of our children I think you just encapsulated like as a parent what I want for my children but what I want for everyone which is you work hard enough at something that you realize that you're better than what you thought you were and then that gives you that taste of like oh my gosh like I am a I'm a I'm a human of great worth and it does it kind of like that's that that's the best dopamine hit possible that the hard work that you have done leads to something that you find useful and that others maybe find useful.

47:22And whatever your domain is, again, coming back to the paining work, maybe it's, maybe it's you, you work in biotech, maybe your antibodies, maybe you're in our genetic medicines team, that like when you're pushed and you kind of dig down deep and something works, I totally agree with that. You just, I mean, that's a drug kind of onto itself. You just want, you just want more of that. I think for some folks. To your point, you rewire your brain, which is pain. It's just like when you start working out, pain is pain, then pain becomes pleasure. And then you start to, your brain just rewires it to pain as pleasure.

47:50Flow state. And this, this idea that you can get to this like state of flow where you like lose track of time. And it's, um, there's a woman who wrote a book on this and I remember in her, in her preamble, it was like, oh man, I've, I've, I've, I've realized there was this thing called flow and I've experienced it like a few times in my life. And I forget her number, but it was like single digit numbers. And I remember reading, and I've read the whole book, but in the beginning I was like, I'm reading like the introduction. I'm like, like a few times in your life. Like you wake up in the morning, then it's like, put yourself into that, that state where you're working on a problem that is occupying your full mind and your talents.

48:24And it's hard. Like it's stressful. Like it's, it's actually very, very hard. One thing that I learned is from Dave Foutinot from HF0, great accelerator. They, they just like turn these hundred million dollars AI startups in like 12 weeks. It's unbelievable. It's crazy. And he really taught me this concept of context window. I think you just naturally do this, which is when you're in flow, you box yourself out. I don't check emails. I don't do everything's on silent. And I take it through this two hour to our window, full contacts on everything. And then I close the tab and then I can move on to other things.

48:57But just encapsulating, basically forcing flow onto the activity has been just a game changer for me. Do you know what that's like? And one of the first places where I saw that that comes from a negative place is when you like procrastinate or you get under a deadline. And I think when I was like a teenager, I'd like procrastinate. Forced flow. It's like it becomes forced flow. I've realized later in life that like, oh my gosh, that tendency. Have you ever procrastinated? Yeah, I think I'm thinking I predisposed to procrastination at times, certainly when I was younger. But what I realized is you just, you force yourself into like, oh my gosh, here's the deadline.

49:31And ideas come better. It kind of gels in. It's just, I don't know, there's something going on, chemicals in your brain that just make you do better work. if you're writing on a deadline, for instance, I talk to friends who are writers, editors, they have to like produce something every day. You just, you kind of develop that muscle a little bit better. The writer's room for The Onion, if you remember our GC was at The Onion before he goes with us, which we joke, that's how seriously we take the law at the family offices. Our GC used to be the GC of The Onion. But Logan would tell stories in the writer's room, like they put out so many ideas in a day and you can only pitch, like everybody pitch an idea but you could never pitch it a second time and it was this like forcing function of like coming like just creative coming up with ideas and then they get lost the next morning more and more and more and just it sharpens that sharpens that ability just like do it really really well with that almost since we last chatted i changed my religion to quality is downstream of quantity it's one of the things one of my central since last time we saw each other like you got married.

50:34I got married and I changed my religion to quantity as upstream of quality or quality as downstream of quantity. I believe it on such a deep level. They all embrace it. I made everybody convert. Quality is downstream of quantity. Yes. Meaning if you want to do more, we now do five episodes a week. Everything on the entire stack has gotten better from editing to podcast booking to social media, everything. Quantity forces quality. So what do you think is going on there and maybe what's the lesson for a biotech executive? The way that you distill that is in the negative, which is people could only improve so much each single at bat.

51:08Meaning if you gave me here the 12 ways to do a podcast better today, one of two things would happen. One is I would ignore it. My ego would come up. Or even if I wanted to, if I'm like, oh, Eric's giving me the best advice. I just couldn't do it. My brain's just not able to process 12 pieces of feedback at once. But if I now do six podcasts this week and you tell me two things, I will process that in the same week versus one podcast a week. So there's some finite ability for the brain to process information. I think that's one thing. There's many layers of that. There's the ego. I think the ego and the self could only change so much on an attempt.

51:46You can't see how far away you are from being good. That makes sense as an agency person because you got here because you're good at a bunch of things. And you can't throw out everything at once and still be decent at what you do. You can't. And look, watching videos of yourself constantly failing and constantly improving is itself like hard to do, but I force myself on it. But I do it now five times a week. And that's just one example. And it's a bit paradoxical and people don't necessarily embrace it. And it's hard to internalize. Do you rewatch like this whole episode or as an editor editing and just pulling out the good stuff?

52:15You watch it yourself? I do the first edit on every episode for other reasons, but partially it forces me to watch it. I will never put something out to somebody else. I want myself watch. It also, it makes me empathize with the listener better as well. So there's other, but this idea of quantity being upstream of quality is very important. And I think it's one of those, you know, this Peter Thielism, which is like, what is something that you believe that other really smart people don't believe? That's kind of my answer these days. That's okay. I like that. Well, what's paired with that somewhat in here, you describe it.

52:42It is, it's not quantity, the sacrifice of quality, right? You were, some people just don't massive quantity, but you're embedding in your quantity. There's processes to it. there's still taste to it. There's still high standards, but at the same time, it's the quantity that's pushing the quality. Trying to bring that into the pharmaceutical. So some of the things it resonates though, which is you, some experiments we design could take years, right? So it's, it's a little bit like, let's come back to SpaceX, right? So NASA can do a phenomenal job overthinking and over-engineering and sort of coming up with the perfect way that we might build a rocket.

53:20Or you can go out and make a whole bunch of incremental changes and improvements quickly and realize what works and doesn't work. The biopharmaceutical industry tends to look more like, let's measure 12 times and cut once. Long time horizons, lots of money, patients' lives, dealing with regulators. It comes all from a place of strength and great care to really overthink it. And the outcomes are uncertain. something that also kind of just that feeds into almost the mentality that maybe we should take great care one of our values at alloy is that we plan carefully and act urgently that's like one value plan carefully act urgently but that started as like act urgently like have a bias towards action sort of like the patient is waiting like we need to do this and it didn't quite work for us on on the balance of how we think about science and how we think about medicine because just to have a bias towards action like are we empowering people is one of our values so you use your values when you're not sure exactly what the what you should do and so you rely on them you're like oh my gosh, just move fast.

54:17That's actually not usually the thing. It's this implicit by planning carefully, you have to do the pre-work. You have to be sharpening your ax every single day. So then when it comes in the moment to swing that ax, it's like really sharp. You could distill it to going in every day and just doing a bunch of attempts of improving your study, improving all these things. It doesn't mean literally submit 100 FDA studies per month or per year, but it's upstream of that before you even submit, like do all that. But I would like a system where the FDA would give us feedback on like an A-B test of like, what about this?

54:47What about that? That's, that's extreme. They can't do it. Although in some of these, you know, some of the great innovations today happening at the FDA, I think are largely happening behind the scenes of, of how does the agency power the reviewers with AI tools, sort of the, the, the large language model, perhaps internally that is all of the private knowledge that the FDA knows that can't, they can't share with the rest of us. And to bring all of that to the reviewer and say, based on everything we've known, like, how do you think you would respond to this? Like those tools are sort of being built and used today.

55:17And so maybe there is a world where we could ask that LLM some questions. We could A, B test a little bit based on your infinite knowledge of the FDA and all the private data you have. If I ran my experiment this way versus this way, like which way do you think will be better? I'm very optimistic that we're going to be able to recognize the patterns in the historical data to make better decisions, to shorten timeframes, to like be more efficient with the agency, which will save us a lot of money and a lot of time. having changed the calculus of drug discovery and development. Well, Eric, as always, this has been unpredictable and intellectually stimulating.

55:50Thanks so much for jumping on. Great. Thanks for having me. It was awesome. Anytime.